the hard life

So this is the photo you've all been waiting for - me studying in Central Park. This was actually taken today, October 7th, and as you can see the sky is blue and the gentle sun's rays are warming me rather nicely. There have been a few days of drizzling rain, and recently some overcast days, but New York actually has a rather consistent and delightful slow descent into winter temperatures. As such, it's 14 degrees C today and I'm lounging in the sun, in flip-flops.



I'm writing this post from the Hungarian Pastry Shop, an Upper West Side landmark made famous by it's appearance in a Woody Allen film. It's full of people talking politics, speaking foreign languages, and finishing PhD theses. It's adored for its dim, slightly dirty, but inviting atmosphere - not to mention the free coffee refills :-) This is how I imagine 'Les Deux Magots' was before Sartre stopped going and American tourists took over.

I'm studying Thomas Aquinas and his theory of analogy. The basic problem is this: when one says a knife is good, or a judge is good, or a play is good, in what sense are they all 'good'? You will notice that good means something slightly different in each case, and so 'good' is almost impossible to define. What we can do is compare the different uses, and try to find a similar feature between the uses. Now, take for example the difference between God is good, and Mother Teresa is good. Whereas in the other examples the different senses of good can be compared, God's goodness is not available for examination because all mention of God's goodness is conveyed by human language, via what it means for a human to be good. But God's goodness must be so qualitively superior, that the human sense of goodness falls impossibly short. So how can we say that God is good, in any sense that is meaningful about God? This is the question that analogy tries to address. I proffer no answers.